by | 15 May 2004 · 12:10 pm

Buruma on the Kamikaze Spirit

Here’s a selection from Ian Buruma’s chapter on Japan’s “War Against the West” in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003).

Suicide was the sacrifice demanded of all Japanese soldiers who were captured by the enemy. But it was demanded of civilians, too. By 1944, Japanese leaders knew that the war could not be won by conventional means, but diehards maintained that even if all Japanese had to die, the kokutai [‘national polity’] would survive forever. There could be no surrender. Thus an ancient privilege of the samurai caste became a national duty. When the Americans landed on Saipan, women and children were made to jump off the cliffs. Up to 170,000 civilians died in Okinawa. Thousands were driven into American machine-gun fire as cover for Japanese troops. Others were forced to make room in hiding places for soldiers by killing themselves and their families with razors, knives, or, if necessary, their bare hands. Hundreds of thousands more perished in the man-made firestorms of Tokyo, Osaka, or Fukuoka, and still Japan’s Götterdämmerung was being blamed by the ruling elite on the insufficient spirit and loyalty of ordinary citizens.

Schoolchildren were ordered to write letters to Japanese soldiers at the front, telling them to “die gloriously.” In 1945, military suicide tactics actually became national policy. The Divine Wind Special Attack Units were the brainchild of Admiral Onishi Takijiro, who committed suicide himself after Japan’s defeat. Young men, often from the best universities, were pressured into volunteering for this last show of Japanese spirit. Submarines and fighter planes were constructed especially for the suicide missions. In fact, even though only one in three suicide fighters actually hit an American target, the tactic was damaging to U.S. ships and cost many lives. But even Admiral Onishi cannot have seriously thought it would win the war. He may have hoped that such tactics would, in the words of one elder statesman, develop a more “advantageous war situation,” forcing the enemy to come to terms. The desired effect was certainly deadly, but it was also theatrical: A peculiar idea of Japaneseness, whose seeds were sown in the late Edo period but which became a national pathology in the late 1930s, had turned from outward aggression to pure self-destruction.

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by | 15 May 2004 · 11:37 am

Buruma on Japan’s Northern Front

Ian Buruma slaps the title “Ah, Our Manchuria” on his chapter about Japan during the 1930s in his book Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003). Here’s how the chapter ends.

Even as the emperor’s troops got bogged down in China, skirmishes on the borders of Manchukuo and the Soviet Union were threatening to get out of control. Officers of the Kwantung army, such as Colonel Tsuji Masanobu, a maniacal soldier responsible for all manner of outrages before the war was over, were itching to attack the Soviet army. Tsuji was a proponent of the Strike North faction, as were most members of the Imperial Way [faction; or Kodoha]. They wanted to contain the Soviet Union by taking control of eastern Siberia. General Araki Sadao, who was, rather absurdly, Prince Konoe’s education minister, once said that if the Soviets did not cease to annoy japan, he would “have to purge Siberia as one cleans a room of flies.”

The Strike North faction was largely army based and attracted many junior officers. Those who wished to avoid a war with the Soviet Union and head south instead, where control of the rich natural resources of Southeast Asia would allow the navy to build up strength for an eventual war in the Pacific, were mostly admirals, generals, and high-ranking officers of the Control faction [Toseiha]. The emperor had no desire to go to war with the Soviets and was on the whole more sympathetic to the navy. There was, however, no consensus at all about what to do next: cut a deal with Chiang Kai-shek and retreat from China proper; patch things up with the West; prepare for an all-out war with the West; prop up a Chinese puppet regime in Nanking; get even closer to Nazi Germany; strengthen the army, strengthen the navy; strike north, strike south. But as so often happened, Tokyo’s dog was wagged by its military tail, once more in Manchuria.

Fighting broke out in the summer of 1938 on the wet and misty borderlands of Korea, Manchukuo, and the Soviet Union. Soviet troops were building a fortification on the Manchukuo side of the Tumen River, and the Japanese decided to test them. The Soviets had bombers and tanks. The Japanese had none, but they set great store on their superior “spirit.” After battling for a fortnight, there were many dead on both sides, more on the Japanese than the Russian, but nothing much was gained or lost. The emperor told his general staff to stop the war. Colonel Tsuji ordered his men to go on regardless. Spirit would see them through. Less than a year later, at Nomonhan [Khalkhin-Gol], on the border with Outer Mongolia, the Japanese, armed with Molotov cocktails, sabers, field guns, and some light tanks, attacked General Zhukov’s Soviet tank brigades. The fighting on ghastly, mosquito-infested terrain went on for months and ended in a slaughter. The flatlands were filled with Japanese corpses, feasted on by black desert vultures. More than twenty thousand Japanese died of hunger, thirst, and disease, as well as from Russian bombardments. Colonel Tsuji was duly promoted. But the plan to strike north was abandoned. From then on all the action would be to the south.

UPDATE: In the comments, Danny Yee questions whether a determined Japanese effort against the Soviets might have achieved victory and possibly even allowed the Nazis to best the Soviets in the West. It’s an interesting question of alternative history. But, judging from the book In the Service of the Emperor: Essays on the Imperial Japanese Army, by Edward J. Drea (U. Nebraska Press, 1998), reviewed here and here, the IJA’s serious deficiencies in logistics and heavy weaponry would have made a decisive northern victory very unlikely. Plus, they were fighting against Marshal Zhukov (although the IJA might have kept him away from Stalingrad, and even Zhukov wasn’t invincible). I think the IJA would have suffered the fate of Napoleon’s army in Russia.

Drea’s lead-off chapter, “Tradition and Circumstances: The Imperial Japanese Army’s Tactical Response to Khalkhin-Gol [Jp. Nomonhan], 1939,” concludes thus:

It seems commonplace that military defeat can be salutary in nature, because it forces out incompetents and promotes innovative reforms. The popular historian Barbara Tuchman wrote, “Whereas defeat in war galvanizes military development, nothing contributes to military desuetude like total victory.” Like most generalizations it overstates the case. The way an army interprets defeat in relation to its military tradition, and not the defeat itself, will determine, in large measure, the impact an unsuccessful military campaign will have on that armed institution.

More specifically, Drea finds that the IJA blamed the defeat more on lack of training and insufficient “fighting spirit” on the part of the newly activated Twenty-third Division, which bore the brunt of the defeat. When a blunt Lt. Col. Konuma suggested that “the IJA hereafter would need equal or superior weaponry to fight foreign armies,” Maj. Gen. Endo called him an imbecile and accused him of insulting the Imperial Army.

NOTE: Gads. The new Blogger interface is at its most buggy when you try to update and republish a post already published. The first thing it does is unpublish the earlier version. Then it gets worse.

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Filed under China, Mongolia

by | 15 May 2004 · 10:15 am

Korean Cosmetic "Imperialism" in Mongolia

Here‘s an interesting, if disjointed, blogpost with comments on “Korean imperialism in Mongolia” that I found while trying to figure out why someone came to my site by googling “korean+hairdos”?! (This site currently turns up at the bottom of the first page of search results by virtue of my two recent posts on the 1932 Aso Coal Strike and Japan’s era of Ero Guro Nansensu in the 1920s, thereby putting “Korean[-Japanese]” and “[bobbed] hairdos” in fairly close sequence. Now I suppose I’ve raised my google rank for “korean+hairdos”!)

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by | 14 May 2004 · 9:52 pm

Zabutons Fly as Asashoryu Streak Ends at 35

Zabutons sailed toward the dohyo after the #1 maegashira Hokutoriki earned a gold star and ended the 35-bout winning streak of Mongolian yokozuna Asashoryu. The other Mongolians are not doing so well this tournament, but the up-and-coming Georgian Kokkai now stands at 5-1, no worse than the yokozuna at this point in the Natsu Basho. As always, more and better detail can be found at That’s News To Me.

(Hey, purists: It took me a while to get used to attaching the English plural to words like zabuton, zori, and musubi, but those nouns–and many more–have long since been borrowed into the English spoken in Hawai‘i.)

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Filed under Hawai'i, sumo

by | 14 May 2004 · 4:56 pm

Rushdie’s Two Wishes for India’s New Era

In a Washington Post column headed “India’s New Era,” Salman Rushdie articulates two wishes for India under the Congress Party after the latter’s upset victory in the latest elections.

I have two immediate wishes for the new era. The first is that the debates about “foreignness” can be laid to rest. Those of us who are part of the Indian diaspora, and who have fought for years to have Indians recognized as full citizens of the societies in which we have settled and in which our children have been born and raised, have found the attack on the Italian origins of Sonia Gandhi, the Congress Party’s leader and widow of the slain prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, to be highly unpleasant. Even more unpleasant were the BJP’s suggestions that her children, the children of Rajiv Gandhi, were also somehow aliens. You can’t have it both ways. If Indians outside India are to be seen as “belonging” to their new homelands, then those who make India their home, as Sonia Gandhi has done for 40 years or so, must be given the same respect. Gratifyingly, the electorate has shown it just doesn’t care about the “foreignness” issue. A BJP leader foolishly said in the immediate aftermath of his party’s rejection that he thought it “shameful” that India might be led by a foreigner. Such slurs are part of the reason for the BJP defeat. They are essentially racist, and must cease.

My second wish is that the study of India’s history can now be rescued from the extremists and ideologues. The outgoing government’s politicization of historical scholarship — its determination to impose textbooks peddling a narrow, revisionist, Hindu-nationalist vision of India’s past on the country’s schools and colleges, and its deriding of the work of the greatest Indian historians, such as Professor Romila Thapar — was one of its most alarming initiatives. The BJP has often seemed to want to inflame our perceptions of the past in order to inflame the passions of the present. Congress and its allies have it in their power to restore the atmosphere of cool objectivity that true learning requires.

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by | 13 May 2004 · 8:20 pm

Jose Ramos-Horta on Military Intervention

Jose Ramos-Horta, the Nobel Peace Prize winner in 1996 and now East Timor’s senior minister for foreign affairs and cooperation, editorializes in the Wall Street Journal:

As a Nobel Peace laureate, I, like most people, agonize over the use of force. But when it comes to rescuing an innocent people from tyranny or genocide, I’ve never questioned the justification for resorting to force. That’s why I supported Vietnam’s 1978 invasion of Cambodia, which ended Pol Pot’s regime, and Tanzania’s invasion of Uganda in 1979, to oust Idi Amin. In both cases, those countries acted without U.N. or international approval–and in both cases they were right to do so.

Perhaps the French have forgotten how they, too, toppled one of the worst human-rights violators without U.N. approval. I applauded in the early ’80s when French paratroopers landed in the dilapidated capital of the then Central African Empire and deposed ‘Emperor’ Jean Bedel Bokassa, renowned for cannibalism. Almost two decades later, I applauded again as NATO intervened–without a U.N. mandate–to end ethnic cleansing in Kosovo and liberate an oppressed European Muslim community from Serbian tyranny. And I rejoiced once more in 2001 after the U.S.-led overthrow of the Taliban liberated Afghanistan from one of the world’s most barbaric regimes….

In almost 30 years of political life, I have supported the use of force on several occasions and sometimes wonder whether I am a worthy recipient of the Nobel Peace prize. Certainly I am not in the same category as Mother Teresa, the Dalai Lama, Desmond Tutu or Nelson Mandela. But Mr. Mandela, too, recognized the need to resort to violence in the struggle against white oppression. The consequences of doing nothing in the face of evil were demonstrated when the world did not stop the Rwandan genocide that killed almost a million people in 1994. Where were the peace protesters then? They were just as silent as they are today in the face of the barbaric behavior of religious fanatics.

Some may accuse me of being more of a warmonger than a Nobel laureate, but I stand ready to face my critics. It is always easier to say no to war, even at the price of appeasement. But being politically correct means leaving the innocent to suffer the world over, from Phnom Penh to Baghdad. And that is what those who would cut and run from Iraq risk doing.

Considering how badly things are going in West Papua, it seems only a matter of time before the question of international military intervention arises there–that is, unless the global media continue largely to ignore it. I hope I’m being too pessimistic. Much will depend on the upcoming Indonesian presidential elections in July.

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by | 13 May 2004 · 2:31 pm

1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Relations

The 20-day-long Korean strike against the Aso coal mines in 1932 was the only sustained strike by a large number of Korean miners in prewar Japan and the largest strike of the year in Chikuho, Japan’s most important coal field. The 400 strikers demonstrated courage and cohesion but won at best a partial victory that left most of them without jobs. This article draws on union documents and a contemporary report by the Kyochokai, a semiprivate organization devoted to labor-capital harmony, to explore the background of the strike, the tactics employed by the male strikers and their wives, and the many obstacles they faced in their fight for better wages and working conditions. The author argues that there was little the workers could do to overcome the harsh antiunion environment of prewar Japan or the surpluses in both coal and labor brought on by the Great Depression, but that the strike might have been more successful if rank-and-file Japanese miners had shown even a hint of solidarity. While a Japanese mining union provided organizational support, the failure of even one Japanese miner to join the strike suggests that Japanese working-class racism severely limited the potential for joint Korean-Japanese action.

SOURCE: W. Donald Smith, “The 1932 Aso Coal Strike: Korean-Japanese Solidarity and Conflict,” Korean Studies 20 (1996): 94-122

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Filed under industry, Japan, Korea, labor

by | 12 May 2004 · 9:47 pm

Buruma on Ero Guro Nansensu

When I ordered the Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit book Occidentalism, I took Amazon’s suggestion and ordered another Buruma book at the same time, Inventing Japan: 1853-1964 (Modern Library Chronicles, 2003), which has turned out to be wonderful. It makes me want to read it aloud to anyone who’ll listen.

Here’s a piece of the chapter on “Ero Guro Nansensu,” about the 1920s.

The Ginza in Tokyo, that Europeanized center of “Civilization and Enlightenment,” had changed a great deal since the dark days of late Meiji. Longhaired young men in roido (from Harold Lloyd) glasses, bell-bottom trousers, colored shirts, and floppy ties would stroll down the willow-lined avenue with young women in bobbed hairdos. The more earnest ones, who gathered in “milk bars” to discuss German philosophy or Russian novels, were known as Marx boys and Marx girls. A few years later, the fashionable young would be renamed mobos (modern boys) and their flapper girlfriends mogas (modern girls). Aside from the milk bars, the Ginza abounded in German-style beer halls and Parisian-style cafés, with waitresses who were free with their favors–for a modest fee. Many patrons of these establishments, with such names as Tiger Cafe and Lion Beer Hall, were journalists, who, like the cafe waitresses, were a feature of this bright new age of mass media and entertainment. Up the street, near Hibiya Park, where the riots of 1905 took place, Frank Lloyd Wright was building the Imperial Hotel, where people would take their tea and eat ultrafashionable “Chaplin caramels.”

A tram ride to the east of the Ginza took one to Asakusa, the center of popular entertainment. This is where the latest Hollywood movies were shown in art deco cinemas and lines of half-naked chorus girls kicked up their legs at the “opera.” In 1920, one might have seen The Lasciviousness of the Viper, directed by “Thomas” Kurihara, who had learned his craft in Hollywood. So had another director of silent movies, “Frank” Tokunaga, who insisted on speaking English to his Japanese crews, putting his studio to the unnecessary expense of having to provide an interpreter. There were posters everywhere advertising sword fight movies about Sakamoto Ryoma and other Edo swashbucklers. There were cabaret shows, comic storytellers, Western, Chinese, and Japanese restaurants. And there was some real opera, too. An Italian from Britain had introduced Tokyoites to the delights of Verdi.

Taisho Tokyo was marked by a skittish, sometimes nihilistic hedonism that brings Weimar Berlin to mind. It produced a culture that would later be summed up as ero for erotic, guro for grotesque, and nansensu, which speaks for itself. In some instances, the similarities with Berlin were more than coincidental. Painters and cartoonists did pictures à la George Grosz. Directors of the New Theater put on plays by Hauptmann and Maeterlinck and studied Max Reinhardt and Stanislavsky. Dada, expressionism, cubism, constructivism, new sobriety: All had had their day in Japan–more than a day, in fact, since trends tend to stick around a lot longer there than in their countries of origin. Novelists looked to Europe, too. Tanizaki Junichiro adopted the style of fin-de-siècle French decadents. One of the best movies of the period, Kinugasa Teinosuke’s Page of Madness, owed much to The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. He made this film only a few years after appearing himself in another, far more conventional picture, playing a woman in a kimono and a pair of sturdy rain boots to cope with the open-air location–theatrical realism was late in coming, even in the movies. Taisho was a time of radical politics, but also of artistic experimentation and introspection. Individualism was carried to the point of self-obsession. Literary diaries recording every nuance of the author’s moods, known as “I-novels,” were highly popular. Far removed from the earnest idealism of Meiji, artists were keen to explore the limits of romantic love and dark eroticism.

Students at elite institutions were just as eager for new ideas. They cultivated a Sakamoto Ryoma-like slovenliness in their dress, used words like “lumpen proletariat” and “bourgeois liberalism” a great deal, and took a passionate interest in DeKanSho, short for Descartes, Kant, and Schopenhauer. Intellectual young women from wealthy families insisted on learning more than household skills, and in 1918 the first women’s university was established in Tokyo. Even soldiers were brushed by the fresh winds of early Taisho. The army minister, Tanaka Giichi, worried that his troops had “become bold and rebellious in their attitudes,” and one commander complained that “due to the rise in general knowledge and social education,” his men could no longer be counted on to follow orders blindly.

So what went wrong? Why had this freewheeling Japanese Weimar spirit been brought down–though not out–by about 1932?

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by | 11 May 2004 · 10:56 pm

Korean Foodie Site

I recommend the site FatMan Seoul for anyone who loves Korean food as much as I do. Best to view it just before lunch.

via Winds of Change

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by | 11 May 2004 · 10:33 pm

Asashoryu Wins 33 in a Row

The sumo Natsu Basho is underway, and Mongolian yokozuna

Asashoryu (3-0) marked 33 straight wins Tuesday, extending the record he set earlier this week when he surpassed the 10-year mark of 30 consecutive victories by yokozuna Takanohana. Asashoryu is the overwhelming favorite to win the summer tournament.

If he wins all 15 bouts in the current tournament, he’ll break a record set in 1949.

Only three wrestlers have had better streaks, with the best, 69, by Futabayama in 1939.

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